“You asked for a day together,” he says, and he looks at his watch. “In all technicalities you’ve already lost ten of your twenty-four hours.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so instead I just groan, press my face into the pillow and ask, “Can we do this tomorrow?”
Even the monster that sits in my skull stops for a moment, stares down at my mouth with a distinct ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ expression on his ugly little face.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Ryan says, and he’s quirking a brow now, staring at me with pursed lips. “I do not change my schedule to cater to your fuck-ups. You want your fourteen hours, then they are going, going, fucking gone unless you place your bid now.”
“Dude,” I say, “too fucking hung-over for that sort of analogy.” And I’ve said it around the same Loretta’s cackled in her corner, wrapped an arm around Ryan’s thin shoulders and let loose an, “I love this kid.”
Ryan just grins a little, ducks his head and stares at me through his bangs, eyebrows still quirked ever-questioningly.
I hear myself sigh, hear myself say, “Gimme an hour to like, wake up and become un-hung-over and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Ryan leans close, breathes into my hair, onto my forehead. “Sold,” he whispers, and fuck, this is just…this is something and maybe it was never supposed to be.
Then again, maybe it was always going to be.
*
My shower’s over too quickly and I don’t dry myself properly because my shirt, it catches on me, on this dampness that trails down my back.
The monster, it must be shitting, its only form of vengeance, coz this bile, this vomit, it builds in the back of my throat, claws at my trachea. But I’m still moving, pulling on a pair of designer jeans and shoes that probably cost more than they should. Shoes that maybe, had that money gone to charity, could have fed several African villages for a few years.
I’m not an activist, not now, not ever. I leave the social conscience to Ryan. The same Ryan who’s sitting on my bed, hands in lap, eyes rolled to the ceiling and like this, right now, he looks like he’s appealing to some higher force.
“You have thirty-four cracks in your ceiling,” he says, “and if you look hard enough, you’ll be able to make out twelve rabbits and quite possibly the silhouette of Woody Allen.”
I collapse back onto the bed beside me, and Ryan, he doesn’t look at me, but I can tell he’s smiling, can see the quirk of full lips.
“Should I be at all concerned about this?”
Ryan, his eyes close and he eases himself onto his back, smile still painted too perfectly across a picture-perfect face. “Only if they start to move.”
“Move,” I say, “or come to life?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
I purse my lips, roll onto my side and let my fingers trail over the sheets beneath us both. “Maybe,” I say, “or maybe it’s just too early for philosophical life questions. All this will get us is me quoting Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and quite possibly requiring coffee even more than I did ten minutes ago.”
“Forty-two?” Ryan says, but his grin is even wider, stretching across his face and leaving crinkles at the corners of his eyelids.
“Starbucks?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?” And Ryan, now he’s just taking the piss. “Come on, then,” he says, and he grips my hand too tight, pulls me off the bed and out of the room, out of the apartment. He doesn’t let go until we leave the complex.
“Really Starbucks?” he says when we’re out on the street, and I can’t quite stifle a grin, opting instead to bury my cold fingers deep inside the pockets of my jacket.
“Starbucks,” I say, coz yeah, Starbucks. I like the fucking place and the monster, he’s typed up his list of demands and a decent cup of coffee has topped the list.
“You’re so romantic,” Ryan replies, and he’s eye rolls and sarcasm today, even if maybe it’s all soft around the edges. “Seriously.”
“Fuck off,” I mumble, but again, soft. This is gentle today, all smiles and sighs that are breathed out onto the air like the most natural thing in the world. Ryan, he’s so tangible here, so rightbymyside and I can’t, don’t have the heart to let him go.
We slip through the door too quietly, too discretely maybe, coz I’m never one to draw attention to myself when, well, when I don’t want it.
“Drink?” I ask, and Ryan nods, runs his fingers through his hair and waits at the doorway.
“Anything,” he replies, grins and nods and I wander up to the counter by myself.
I take a quick glance up at the menu-board above the front desk and lean against the countertop just enough to draw attention to myself from the pile of exhausted girls in white t-shirts and crinkled green aprons.
The woman, girl who wanders over is tiny, skinny, petite, with boobs that look like they could topple her over. She has too many freckles, and bright red hair that spills beneath her cap like daylight, like sunset-sky. There’s this sharp intake of breath when she reaches me, and her eyes, they’re too wide, too brown and too clear.
“Hi,” I mumble, “two vanilla chai lattes please.”
“Hi,” she whispers back, and her voice, it’s an earthquake in itself, trembling with every change of weather, every change of atmosphere, tone, people. “You…you’re-“
“Yeah,” I say, and I lean close over the top of the counter. Her nametag, it reads Alice, and this girl, the tiny thing, she can’t be much older than sixteen. Ryan’s casting amused stares from the doorway, shoulders leaning hard against the wall. “Alice,” I say, “Alice, can you keep a secret?”
She nods rather adamantly, head bopping hard and those eyes, they’re too honest, too yesyesyes.
“Ryan,” I say, and it slips out through the space between my teeth. “Ryan over there, he thinks I’m not worth it.”
Alice leans closer, whispers, “And what do you think?”
I breathe out too quickly, and the girl keeps flashing me startled looks, like she can’t quite believe this is happening. “I think maybe he’s right.”
She rocks on her heels a little, forehead furrowed and her big white teeth start to gnaw at a plump bottom lip. “I don’t,” she says. “I think you’re very, very handsome, and I think that maybe you could be a gentlemen.”
I laugh a little, plant my hands flat on the counter and stare back with a quirked brow. “What makes you say that?”
“Well,” she says, and she’s blushing, deep down to the roots of her hair. “I watched this interview with you on youtube after…after that movie, you know, The Most Tempting Thing was released, and you seemed real, like, like polite, you know?”
“Right,” I say, and right, this little girl, she has no idea about the real world, and I was baiting her, I knew I was baiting her. I don’t know why I was expecting a more in-depth response.
“Order?” I ask, and she flushes again.
“What size?”
“Large,” I say, and I gesture with my hands, my fingers miming out my coffee S.O.S. – the monster’s getting tetchy.
Alice scurries off and makes the drinks too quickly, a flurry of emotion and nervousness, and her hands, they’re still shaking a bit, like she can’t quite wait to get back to the laptop in her parent’s house to post this on livejournal.
She comes back and she’s still red from the base of her neck to the ends of her hair. “Here,” she says, and she hands over two coffees that smell like nirvana to the monster in me.
I nod my head, and start to wander back to Ryan, but Alice, I hear her fingers tap on the counter before she yells out a, “You said please.”
Everyone in the café is staring at her, and she blushes all over again – someone must be injecting all this red, all this fusciamagentapinkorange just beneath her skin.
I laugh, and wander back over. Ryan, I can feel him shoot a questioning glance behind me. “What?”
“You…” Her fingers are spread-eagle on the counter, and her eyes are wide and her lips pursed, like she can’t believe what she’s doing. “You said please. When you asked for the drinks, you said please.”
I quirk a brow. “So?”
“So,” she says, “I’ve lived here for like, my entire life, I mean-“and she stumbles over the words, “not like, in Starbucks, but, you know, in LA.” She sighs. “What I mean is I’ve worked here for two years, and…and I could count the people who’ve said ‘please’ on one hand.”
“You serve a lot of assholes?”
“I serve a lot of people who are more interested in looking at my tits than in ordering coffee.” And fuck, that was the first thing I noticed about her. Maybe she sees me flush a little, coz she looks at the floor and grins, a sad little thing.
“I’m used to it,” she says, “I mean…yeah.”
“Most girls draw attention to it deliberately though.” And maybe that’s sorta my only defence. Alice doesn’t say much, just tucks loose strands of fiery-red hair behind her ear
“Yeah,” she says, “but a lot of girls don’t too.”
The silence here is all consuming, and it extends from Alice’s toes to my throbbing head. I can hear footsteps and the dull slide of sandals, stilettos and designer sand-shoes on the tiled floor.
“Life,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else. “It gets better.”
“Of course you can say that,” she says, “you’re a celebrity. ”
Alice, she grins now, something that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. There’s a cotton thread that has fallen out of my chest, gotten caught on her fingernails, and she’s tugging ever so softly, ever so unintentionally at them, at my heartstrings.
“Not all of us are made for that,” she murmurs, and yeah, that’s it.
This doesn’t so much hit close to home as it does bash the door down, storm up the stairs and breathe too coarsely down the back of my neck, because, in all harsh reality, that’s what my mother said. On the phone, when I called her, ‘ not all of us are destined for the life you’ve managed to set up for yourself’.
Fuck, I think, and this is when I say that people are in charge of their own future. This is when she says to an extent. This is when she tells me that everyone else decides your future; this is when she tells me that she didn’t love Dad.
“I guess not,” I say instead, and Alice huffs out a little sigh, pulls off her cap and all that red hair spills over her face.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asks, and now, right here, she’s all wry smiles and coy eyes. She’s an imitation of me five minutes ago, a carbon copy of some top secret agenda and the real letter was sent off an hour ago.
“Probably not,” I reply, but I lean close anyway, and Alice, she breathes into my ear.
“I don’t like to talk about the future,” she murmurs.
“Alice.” And I laugh under my breath, down into her neck and I can’t imagine what we look like. “Neither do I.”
I grab the two coffees and nod a goodbye, spinning on my heel to see Ryan staring at the ceiling, blowing wayward clumps of hair off his face.
I head over, but I don’t get too far before a voice calls me back.
“Hey, Mr. Urie!” Alice yells, and she’s leaning over the counter, smiling too hard and those eyes, fuck, she’s young. “I’ve just given your ego a bit of lovin’, the least you can do is give me an autograph.”
I laugh, pull out one of the napkins from the holder, and I write too quickly, swirl a little signature at the bottom and drop it onto the counter. Alice just smiles again, giggles and puts it into the pocket of her apron.
*
Grinning back, I turn around again and Ryan, Ryan, he isn’t there. I have to stifle my panic, breathe in too quickly, so quickly it shakes my lungs and there’s this bench across the street, you can see it from the window here, and Ryan’s sitting there with his legs crossed and a tiny little book that is almost hidden by his palms.
Right, and I choke out a breath, let it loose through my clenched teeth. It’s all I can do not to scream, not to storm across the street and almost get hit by a speeding Mercedes.
I fist my fingers around the Styrofoam coffee cups instead, walk over on stiff legs until I loom over Ryan’s tiny shadow.
“You shouldn’t wander off,” I say. “I could’ve like…I could’ve lost you.”
Ryan’s eyes glance up from the book, and he stares with wide eyes. “I’ve lived here almost as long as you have. I know my way around.”
“Yeah, but, uh-“
“You haven’t lost me,” he mumbles, “not yet.”
I let loose a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding back, choke it out from the dark depths of my throat, my lungs, and I throw myself onto the bench beside him, pass him a coffee that he takes with nimble, curling fingers.
“So I called my mum,” I mumble, and me saying this, it has to be Alice, has to be her coz she’s ripped the plaster off, peeled back the bandage too quickly and the scars are too raw still. She’s torn off the lid, and the memories scatter, ooze onto the floor between Ryan and me.
“So I heard.”
“Uhm, she was…” I take another deep breath, scuff the toes of my shoes on the grit that litters the ground. “You said she was unhappy and you were…well, you were like, right.”
“I know,” Ryan says, and he blows strands of hair off his face.
“My point is,” I say, “I did what you asked.”
“Brendon,” Ryan replies, and he’s staring like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “I didn’t ask you to do it for me, I wanted you to do it for you. I…how…did you miss the point of all that?”
He takes a deep breath, but his eyes, those almonds that are so deeply ingrained in his face, they don’t blink or waver. “I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I wasn’t trying to win a fucking argument, I wanted you to…forget it.”
And the blood is pounding between my eyes; the monster’s sitting there hammering away with a chunk of wood that looks like something from The Flintstones. A headache is coming on, setting in, so all I can say, all I do say is, “All right.”
Only I hesitate, instead of leaving it, I tack on a - “My mum had an affair.”
Ryan just smiles, very briefly, very softly, “More than sixty-percent of marital relationships have suffered the effects of adultery.” He casts me a sidelong stare, peers deep from beneath his eyelashes. “More than forty-percent of those live through it unaware.”
I ignore him though, take a draining gulp of coffee, and stare at my shoes. “She told me and…and what do you say to that?”
Ryan stares for a moment, sighs and drops his book into his messenger bag. He doesn’t quite make eye-contact, opting instead to watch the ants run races past the trailing denim of his jeans.
“Nothing,” he says. “And she wouldn’t…she couldn’t have expected you to.”
I laugh a little, wrap my fingers tighter around the coffee cup. “I kinda wish she hadn’t told me.”
His eyelids flutter shut, and right here, right now he looks like he was born for this role, this quiet understanding. “Can you honestly say your relationship is worse because she did?”
“It wasn’t all that good to begin with.” And I shrug, move my shoulders enough that the rest of me slumps back onto the cold wooden bench.
Again, someone’s found the remote control, has tapped it too hard against the counter, wrong side up, and the mute button’s been hit in the process. This silence, it’s not comfortable, it’s odd and out of place – my lips are still moving, and everyone who watches on moves closer to the speakers, tries to hear, but the point is…the point is, no sound is coming out.
Nothings being said, not a word, not a whistle, not a hum of breath until Ryan, until he sighs too hard, slumps forward, and stares at the ground. Not until he says, “My dad was an alcoholic.”
I close my mouth here, stop gaping like a fish out of water, a cat without air.
“He made me unhappy, and y’know, I say I’m a writer, I pretend that I can say all these things so beautifully, but when it comes to him, when it comes to that, all I can say about our relationship was that it was destructive, for, well, for both of us.” Ryan rubs clenched fists on the thighs of his jeans, his coffee cup having been dumped on that bare fraction of wooden bench between us.
“He came back from Vietnam unhappy, and he thought he could clutch onto those bare threads of life by fucking some teenage girl in a bar, apparently without a condom, without birth control. And when she didn’t want the baby, he thought he could renew his lease on life by starting a new one.”
I find my mouth, my vocal chords again in just enough time to choke out a, “Didn’t work?”
Ryan laughs a little, manages to look up at me through his bangs and shakes his head. “Nobody can expect a new life to bring back one already lost. Maybe your mum and my dad were alike in that way. My dad expected me to give him something I couldn’t give, and maybe your mum was expecting you and your siblings to validate a love for a man she didn’t have.”
And maybe, maybe that makes more sense than it should. “Yeah.”
“When I couldn’t give him happiness, he looked for it in other places.” Ryan, he’s, and I don’t know why I’ve never seen it before, but he’s tired, exhausted even. It’s not something entirely visible, no dark rings beneath almond eyes, no wrinkles or sighs, but there’s this atmosphere, this air to him that’s just so much older than he is. “I could write a million clichés on the bottom of a bottle, but none would be as predictable and as hopelessly desolate as the real thing.”
“He wanted to drink himself back to life,” Ryan continues, and he leans back on the bench, looks me straight in the eye for maybe the first time in forever. “But instead he drank himself to death.”
I always end up in these conversations, chats, discussions, debates where I don’t know what to do or say or think, and instead of thinking out an answer, instead of figuring out a way to break the silence sensibly, I sit tight and quiet until my mouth breaks it for me. “How’d you end up in the diner?”
Ryan stares for a moment, shifts his feet on the ground and picks up his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I don’t even know. He died and I hitchhiked my way to oblivion.”
“And then?”
“And then,” he says, and he smiles at me, really smiles, and there aren’t any teeth and it might be a little sad but it’s directed at me, and that’s all I can pay attention to. “I met you.”
Something warms at that, my chest swells and my heart aches and wires pull at my cheeks and my lips and I’m smiling back before I can stop myself. I duck my head a little, and fuck, there’s heat in my cheeks and I’m, I’m blushing or something.
Ryan, he must see coz he laughs a little, chuckles deep in his throat and runs a hand through his hair. “What a pair we make.”
I don’t reply, so Ryan, he continues, “We’re living clichés, living parodies, cut down on the cusswords and we could work the Disney scene.”
“Nah,” I say, “there haven’t been any villains to defeat.”
Ryan laughs again and it echoes in my ears. “Really? I thought I made a pretty good one.”
“No, you were the, the mentor guy,” I reply. “Merlin to my Arthur.”
He smiles at that. “Always the hero.”
Ryan stares at the ground again, his eyes, the liquid chocolate of his eyelids, they’re half-lidded and delicate right now. Everything here, the breeze and the coffee, the sky and the company, it’s so fucking serene, so gentle and this…And this, I think I could live like this, in these moments, these seconds because I’ve never spoken like this, I’ve never felt like this about a situation, about someone.
“I think I’m in love with you.”
I could count the silences today, the moments where the conversation trails off, the chatter dies, and maybe someone leans on the mute button again, coz this, it can’t be normal.
Ryan sighs, and he won’t, doesn’t make eye contact for a million moments. It’s been a decade, a millennia before he opens his mouth again, and I’ve been left to sweat and shake and drink until my throat is raw from the heat of boiling coffee.
“What happened to the ballet dancer, Brendon?”
I start at that, because this, it wasn’t what I was expecting. “What?”
“That girl you used to fuck,” he says, and his fingers, they’re clenched around the coffee cup. I can see the indent his fingers are making on the Styrofoam. “The ballet dancer.”
“Oh.” And I hadn’t thought of her really.
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and his eyes are wide, forehead furrowed and again, he’s not…he’s older, tired and I don’t understand, I don’t get it. “Brendon, that’s my point. You get bored of people, and then they just, they just fall off the face of your Earth. They keep on living, but you don’t give a fuck. You didn’t give a fuck about your mother, or Catherine, or the ballet dancer, and you won’t give a fuck about me.”
Ryan’s fingers, they’re still on the Styrofoam, but maybe they’re around my throat as well, because all of it, my neck, all of its insides are clenching shut. My trachea tangling around my vocal chords and a part of me can’t breathe, and the other part of me just, it says, “There’s a difference between you and the ballet dancer though.”
Ryan scoffs, and his fingers clench tighter around the cup, and my throat constricts even more because this, this isn’t what I want, this isn’t fucking serene anymore, this is quickly becoming bitter and angry and all these emotions that I’ve always associated with the word love. This is everything I’ve never wanted it to be.
”What difference?” he says, and he mutters it too quickly, out through clenched teeth. “I’m a guy?”
“No,” I reply, because no, “well, yes, but that’s not what I mean, and…”
“And what, Brendon?”
And this isn’t going the way I want it too.
“I never thought I was in love her.”
Breathe in, I tell myself, just breathe.
Ryan’s eyes are scrunched shut, and he rubs tight fingers over them, drops his coffee cup back onto the bench. He sighs and his arms, if I look close enough, I swear I can see them shake. “This won’t work,” he says, and fuck you, Ryan Ross, fuck you for saying that, even if maybe I’ve been thinking it all along.
“Not with that attitude it won’t,” I say, and I lean over, grab one of his clenched fists in my hands and hold it close to my thigh. Ryan, he doesn’t snatch it away, so I take that as a good sign.
“What happens when you get bored of me?”
“I…” And I don’t know.
Ryan, he’s rolling now, autopilot, has released the parachute and all of this, it’s out of his control. He’s latched onto a topic I’m not even sure he believes in, and he’s talking until he can stop. “What happens when people ask about me?” he says. “Who are you going to be taking to premieres? Award ceremonies? Parties? Who’s gonna be on your arm on E! News?”
He’s moving too quickly for me, so when I choke out a, “You won’t be a secret,” he’s armed and perfectly poised with a, “Prove it.”
And me, I do what I always do when faced with something I don’t understand, something I can’t comprehend, something that I don’t fucking know. I let go of his hand and grab hold of his face before crushing my lips onto his. I’m trying to get so close, too close, trying to merge, trying to get in his face, in his head, trying to change his mind, and I don’t, I’ve never kissed like this before. Never kissed with so much intent and purpose and raw desperation, and when we come up for air, we’ve both had the life and the emotion and the thought sucked out of us.
“We don’t know anything about each other.” And maybe he doesn’t even say it, it’s so quiet, too quiet, breathed out onto the passing breeze.
This, it’s enough of an excuse that I don’t blame myself when all I can counter Ryan’s blank gaze and heaving breath with is, “Come home with me.”
He doesn’t nod for a second, but when he does I hold his hand too tight, so tight that maybe we did merge, maybe we are one person now, one thought, one concept and when we walk the three blocks to my empty apartment we don’t talk, we fuck.
*
The sunlight filters through the splice in the curtains, and the monster’s been stifled enough that all I can feel is his claws raking tiredly against the back of my skull, the sides of my neck. I roll over, fling an arm over an empty bedside, and Ryan, he left sometime in the night, stumbled over shoes and magazines and CDs and I pretended to sleep through his muttered curse words and staggering feet.
I wasn’t surprised, and even today, years later, I don’t blame him for it. I would’ve done the same thing in his position.
It’s in these moments, when I’m tired and hungry, but probably more sexually-sated than I’d like to admit, that I lie back and think too hard. Think until my brain swells shut, props a closed for renovation, a do not disturb sign up between my eyes and I’m left with conclusions that leave me aching. Results and dead-end thought processes that leave my stomach twisted in on itself and blood that runs thin and slow between my vital organs.
Ryan says I get bored of people, but I don’t.
They get bored of me, and I leave them before they can figure that out.
Chapter 18
Contrary to what a plethora of jaded critics will say, there’s a difference between writing your memoirs and writing an autobiography. In reality, or rather, in the society in which we live, there’s this vast, mammoth disparity in these two methods of chronicling your life, noting the (usually nicer) shades of your character.
I don’t know, maybe Ryan’s influenced me too much, his nagging monotone that seeps a gentle, and often contemptuous cynicism into my life, into me. I adopt too many of his traits, his styles, his ways of understanding, absorbing what goes on around him; then again, that’s what happens in a relationship. Loretta, and she always says it with a quirked eyebrow and an air of derision, she says that’s what happens when you find your soul mate.
I don’t know.
The point is, Ryan used to tell me that when someone writes their memoirs, they do it because they think they have something worth remembering, worth sharing. These people, they write and write and write to try and sort through the parts of their head that don’t make any sense. He says the point of writing memoirs, the point is, you find this key, a dirty, ancient thing, and then, maybe years later, maybe minutes, you find a door.
Your memoirs, it’s you unlocking it, it’s you finding yourself in a room with bloodstained, shit-stained floors, torn curtains, broken windows. It’s you stuck in a room where the rain pokes through the shattered glass and runs races down the walls like the tears you never cried.
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